Pedro Alvares Cabral's ships left Portugal on 9 March 1500 en
route for the territory that he first named Terra de Vera Cruz and that
later came to be known as Brazil. On the 22 March they called at the
island of Sao Nicolau [Caminha, 1500], one of the northernmost islands
of the Cape Verde group; this was about forty years after the discovery
of the archipelago in 1460-62 [Albuquerque, 1991]. (1) It is known that
Vasco da Gama had stopped at the island of Santiago in 1498 on his
voyage to India, and also in 1499 on the return journey. Straight after
the discovery of Brazil Cabral sailed for India and on the way back also
dropped anchor at Santiago. Indeed, our archipelago, which is situated
off Cape Verde in Senegal (the place from which it appears to take its
name), was to become an important stopover point for maritime traffic
between Europe, Asia and the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, both to allow crews to rest and to take on water, wood and
some food supplies. It also became important as a holding point for
slaves (a large number of whom came from around thirty Guinean ethnic
groups and subgroups). They were dispatched from Santiago, known then as
Cape Verde island, to territories such as Brazil from the early
sixteenth century onwards, since these territories, which had only
recently been discovered and were little known, needed people to work
and populate them.

But these slaves from the African coast, who set out from the
archipelago where they had been dropped and where they had waited to
board again, often came back as changed people both culturally and
psychologically [Almada, 1999]. Thus exchanges between Brazil and the
Cape Verde Islands took place early. Influences from Brazil were to be
felt in areas as diverse as Cape Verde literature, music, dance,
religion, beliefs, folk medicine and social life. We shall analyse these
influences in turn, highlighting those that have been felt during the
twentieth century and particularly those that are thought to be recent.
We shall take as our starting point the 1922 Modernist cultural movement
in Brazil of which Mario de Andrade, a mestico, was one of the leaders.
But first I shall review some general points.

Given the multitude of links that grew up between the Cape Verde
Islands and Brazil especially Bahia, the great coastal region that is in
a way the mirror image of the agricultural landscape of the Guinea coast
that supplied the slaves [Lobo, 1960], it is highly likely that the
archipelago grew maize even before it appeared in Portugal [Ribeiro,
1962: 28]. The cereal was a crucial factor in the islands'
colonization, since it was after its introduction that the colonization
movement, which had previously been sporadic, "with highs and lows,
and had not varied from the same feeble rate at which it had begun,
started to take off" [Ribeiro, 1962: 31].

And so the Cape Verde Islands obtained maize from Brazil, but also
tobacco, coffee, fruit trees and the medicine tree (purgueira), while
Brazil, or more precisely Bahia, obtained from the islands the first
oxen, mares, ewes, goats, coconuts, sugar cane, rice seeds, and of
course many slaves [Ribeiro, 1960: 62]. All these animals, plants and
slaves were exported from the islands but had come from elsewhere.

It is not surprising that a society evolved on the islands
"paralleling the society in Bahia, on the other side of the
Atlantic but in fact containing the same elements and characteristics
that make them so alike even now, despite the differences in
today's environment", as Ribeiro wrote in 1960 [p. 158].
Indeed, over and above these differences, there are many aspects common
to the two territories. There is the important place of mixed-race
people (a result of interbreeding of African slaves and European
colonists in both tropical territories) in the development of both
societies; indeed, mixed-race people were the main agents of the
democratization of social life. However, mixed-race people stand for
racial, social and cultural democratization in the islands more than in
Brazil [Mariano, 1959], which can probably be linked to the fact that,
unlike Cape Verde society, racial discrimination is sadly still a blot
on Brazilian society.

Although Gilberto Freyre acknowledged some years ago that racial
equality had not become either perfect or absolute with the abolition of
slavery in 1888, he recalled the view of Bryce who said that in Brazil
the distinction between races is more a distinction of position or class
than colour [1972: 148], a view that he was not the only foreign visitor
to express. "Even in the colonial period", Freyre wrote,
"if a person was politically or socially important, no significance
was attached to whether or not their past was unsullied by African blood
-- he or she was considered to be white." He called this social
aryanization. Gabriel Mariano [1959] reaches similar conclusions as far
as the islands are concerned.

However, we must reiterate that, whereas the archipelago solved the
problem of racial equality some time ago, Brazil is still wrestling with
it. If we are to believe the evidence, this may be verified today in
several sectors of the economy: black Brazilians still encounter
difficulties at work. With regard to these differences between the two
societies, a Brazilian actress who was visiting the archipelago said
recently that she never thought she would come across a people [like the
Capeverdians] who think black, white, yellow, brown, or
`furta-cores' (`of changing colour') is all the same thing. It
is very different in Brazil where to be black is to be disadvantaged.
"You can't imagine what it's like to be black in
Brazil" [Almeida, 2000: 8].

The reasons why relations between Portuguese and Africans (many of
whom had set out from the islands) have had such different results (as
well as many similarities) have to do with the small size of Cape
Verde's territory. It was not suited to large-scale farming, with
its attendant need for slave labour and its type of dehumanizing social
relations [for details, see Mariano, 1959; Lobo, 1960; Correia e Silva,
1996].

Some of the slaves sent to Brazil occasionally had their own very
advanced culture, others took with them a culture that was already the
result of a mixture of Portuguese and African elements, since while they
were waiting to be shipped to their "final destination" they
had been taught the rudiments of the Christian religion and the
Portuguese language or the island creole.

We should remember that the slaves were mostly from the Guinea
seaboard, mandingas, jalofes, papeis, Sudanese negroes, perhaps some
Moslem fulas, Ibo, Yoruba, Bantu [Freyre, 1933; Ribeiro, 1960; Correia e
Silva, 1996]. It is useful to bear this in mind when looking at the
issue of the relationship between these two tropical countries. But
there is at least one considerable shadow darkening the picture, which
was the probably unpredictable consequence of a political decision: the
setting up in 1755 by the Marques de Pombal of the Great Para and
Maranhao Company, whose excesses were for some time to plunge the
archipelago into poverty and ruin.

Given the need for labour for its plantations and trading posts in
Brazil, the Company was granted in 1757 the exclusive right to trade and
navigation on the islands and the Guinea coast. Abusing this power it
doubled the price of slaves, which made it hard for the farmers of Cape
Verde to obtain labour and led to the end of cotton growing, the decline
of the cloth (panos) industry and the harvesting of a type of lichen
[Amaral, 1964], an important product that the island colony exported to
Europe (Cadiz, Seville, Paris) for silk and fine muslin dyeing.

The Company's disastrous effect on the archipelago was further
worsened by the great famine of 1773-6 [Correia e Silva, 1996]. Its
consequences were felt not only in Africa and Brazil, but even in
Portugal [Amaral, 1964].

Finally we should note the part played by the port on Sao Vicente
island, Porto Grande, in the exploits of the Dutch in Brazil. It was a
crucial location for the conquest of Olinda in 1629. And its development
was considered at least twice in terms of commercial relations with
Brazil -- in the nineteenth century as well as in the 1920s -- since it
was the link in the chain of trade between the two countries, and of
course this did not cease with Brazil's Independence and the end of
the slavery.

Cultural influences

The history of many peoples whose lands were colonized (or occupied
by foreigners) has demonstrated that, in certain circumstances, their
culture has a tendency to mimic the colonizers' culture. It is
perhaps in literature that this imitation is most evident. This it is
generally recognized that the literature of the USA began by copying
English literature until the nineteenth century when writers of the
stature of Edgar Alan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt
Whitman and Emily Dickinson appeared [Brown, 1954]. Similarly the
literature of Brazil was first a continuation of Portuguese literature
until the emergence of writers like Jose Lins do Rego, Jorge Amado,
Jorge de Lima, Erico Verissimo, Manuel Bandeira, among others, even
though it is agreed that they had predecessors of some significance [see
Freyre, 1972]. And literature was not alone; indeed it was aided in this
task of establishing Brazilian identity by the sociological and
anthropological work by Arthur Ramos or Gilberto Freyre.

Literature

The literature of the islands also illustrates what has just been
said; for a long while it was a reflection of Portuguese literature. It
was only from the mid 1930s that it identified a group of themes that
were more or less specific to it and found a more individual language;
and these were themes and a language that distinguished it from what was
being done (or would later be done) in Portugal. The individuals who
made these first attempts at finding an identity were considerably
helped by their familiarity with the Brazilian Modernist movement. One
of the leaders, Baltazar Lopes da Silva, said the following in 1956:

A little over twenty years ago a small group of friends and I had started
to think about our problem, that is, Cape Verde's problem. We were
particularly concerned with the process of social development on these
islands, research into Cape Verde's roots. We could more or less put our
finger on the problem but we had no specialist knowledge or any experience
with this type of research. Apart from one or two fields, such as language,
we were complete novices in so many areas, for instance cultural
anthropology, acculturation, the relationship between race and culture,
folklore studied as a science. We needed a systematic basis that could only
come from elsewhere in the form of methodological assistance and research.
However, it happened that at that moment some books that we had identified
as essential pro domo nostra came into our hands together as a fraternal
loan. In fiction Jose Lins do Rego's O Menino do Engenho and Bangue, Jorge
Amado's Jubiaba and Mar Morto, Armando Fortes's Os Corumbas, Marques
Rebelo's O Caso de Mentira, which Ribeiro Couto had told us about. In
poetry it was like a light coming on (alumbramento): Evocacao de Recife by
Manuel Bandeira, which I could visualize, with its dramatic characters and
only a few details changed, in my village of Ribeira Brava. Totonio
Rodrigues, with his pince-nez on the end of his nose, was Nho Pedro
Antonio, whom I had got to know and who had the face of Father Antonio
Vieira in the pictures in my schoolbooks. And the stark naked girl was seen
in the Ribeira Joao reservoirs, just above the Pequena trapiche. In poetry
Jorge de Lima was the other revelation. In his work the sinhazism of the
negress (Nega) Fulo and the superrealism of O Menino Impossivel went hand
in hand in our receptive minds with Jorge de Lima's A Tunica Inconsutil,
with the asthmatic coughing, the sewing machines that need sleep, and the
island theme, so typical of here, of the plane that kills the mothers'
saudade [that is a consequence] of the fact that their sons are destined to
wander. It is obvious that the plane, in our thematic, takes many forms,
and can even be the sailing ship that goes from island to island in some of
Jorge Barbosa's poems.

And Baltazar adds:

this fiction and this poetry showed us an atmosphere, types, ways of
behaving, faults, virtues, attitudes to life that resembled those of these
islands, especially as regards what is most characteristic and least
contaminated about them.

As for the rest -- anthropological and sociological issues, the
relationship between race and culture, other problems in interpreting
social evolution and cultural remains in societies like ours -- Gilberto
Freyre's work Casa Grande & Senzala, and Arthur Ramos's
books, which are "packed with research and interpretation",
were fundamental.

Baltazar Lopes da Silva, philologist, essayist, novelist,
short-story writer and, under the pseudonym Osvaldo Alcantara, poet,
together with a group of his compatriots, laid the foundations of Cape
Verde literature under the influence, as it were, of "their
brothers across the Atlantic". They began with a review, Claridade,
which they launched in Mindelo in 1936 and published until 1952 (nine
issues in all, with gaps of varying lengths).

Apart from Baltazar Lopes da Silva, there was Manuel Lopes, Joao
Lopes and Jorge Barbosa. These Cape Verde intellectuals (the initial
core group was slightly expanded with the addition of Arnaldo Franca,
Antonio Aurelio Goncalves, Nuno Miranda, Teixeira de Sousa and Felix
Monteiro) drew on the work of Brazilian masters to develop their
socio-anthropological research and produced the first approaches that
were essential for an understanding "of the structure, values and
cultural constants of the archipelago" [Silva, 1986: XIV].

The influence of Brazilian literature of the 1920s on
Claridade's writers, the claridosos, has already been remarked on
many times and not without some difference of view [see Ferreira, 1973:
86; Goncalves, 1998]. On the other hand the influence of some Brazilian
poets, such as Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, Jorge de
Lima, Joao Cabral de Melo e Neto, on the Cape Verde poets who followed
the claridosos -- I am thinking especially of T. T. Tiofe, Joao Vario,
Corsino Fortes, Armenio Vieira -- has not to my knowledge been
highlighted. That justifies my saying a few words about it, even though
this is not the appropriate place for detailed analysis.

It is odd to note that a certain concept, pasagardism, which was
apparently suggested some time ago to designate the Cape Verde
people's desire to escape, was inspired by a poem by Manuel
Bandeira, Vou-me embora pra Pasargada (`I'm going away to
Pasargada'). In addition, Bandeira gives prominence to certain
characters from everyday life and, according to their written evidence,
this seems to have interested Cape Verde poets such as Jorge Barbosa,
Gabriel Mariano, Ovidio Martins, Tiofe and Corsino Fortes; he also
stresses certain anxieties, which are elevated into myths or selected as
themes worthy of exploration in literature, as is the case with
Pasargada. Originating with Bandeira, this theme was taken up by Osvaldo
Alcantara, then by Ovidio Martins. But, whereas for his predecessors
Pasargada is a place that has to be sought out to enjoy the good things
in life (Bandeira) or that is remembered with light saudade, since
everything is there, it is a different civilization (Alcantara; see his
cycle of poems Road to Pasargada), things are very different for Martins
who writes: "I'll yell/I'll kill/ I won't go to
Pasargada". This poem, which is dedicated to Joao Vario (one might
rather have expected it to be dedicated to Osvaldo Alcantara or Manuel
Bandeira), is very suggestively entitled Anti-evasao (`Against
escape').

So it was that a famous Brazilian poem had echoes in our poetry and
even further afield. As we have seen, it gives rise to a nation claiming
to identify a psychological or sociological characteristic that raises
to an `empathetic' paroxysm (the case of Martins) an aspect of
Brazilian literature's (here more precisely Brazilian
poetry's) influence on Cape Verde literature and poetry. There is
also empathy between Manuel Bandeira and Jorge Barbosa, the pioneer of
the transformation of poetic themes into a Cape Verde idiom, who in an
extremely moving poem (A Palavra Profundamente, `The Word Deeply',
published in Claridade 8: 26, 1958), wrote a comment on Bandeira's
very beautiful poem Profundamente, in which the poet in just a few lines
says everything there is to say about death, especially the death of
friends and acquaintances. Empathy too exists between Ribeiro Couto and
Jorge Barbosa. To see it one has only to read Ribeiro Couto's Dia
Longo and compare it with Jorge Barbosa's Caderno de um Ilheu. It
was probably no coincidence that Aurelio Goncalves was sufficiently
interested in Erico Verissimo to devote an essay [1949, 1998] to his
novel Clarissa.

It should be noted that some of these writers from both sides of
the Atlantic became firm friends. Some wished to get to know each other
and exchange letters - one day this correspondence will have to be
assembled and published. (We should also note that at least two
pre-Claridade writers, Jose Lopes and Pedro Cardoso, had been interested
in Brazilian literature and society [Manuel Ferreira, 1986:
xxxvii-xxxviii].)

Baltazar Lopes da Silva stresses the fact that "the
atmosphere, ways of behaving, faults, virtues, attitudes to life",
described in Brazilian fiction and poetry, are similar to what can be
found in our islands [p. 5]. In this context it may be interesting to
point out some differences.

From reading their Brazilian counterparts, Cape Verde writers took
the social critique, the description of daily life and in all
probability attempts to deal with acculturation and the issue of
socialization. But one cannot help noticing a significant difference
that runs alongside these similarities between the novelists of the two
movements: in the Brazilians' work there are extremely full
descriptions of sexual relations, whereas the Cape Verde writers appear
to avoid this type of description. This is also true of extreme poverty
or racial conflicts. My compatriots speak of poverty, but not really,
one would think, of extreme wretchedness and its traumas as the
Brazilians do. Out of a certain squeamishness? Out of shame? T. T. Tiofe
recalls that, having presented O Primeiro Livro de Notcha to Aurelio
Goncalves, the latter made just one comment a few days after reading it:
"But why should one always talk about the poverty in these
islands?"

I tend to think that, unlike their Brazilians counterparts, the
claridoso novelists, Baltazar Lopes da Silva, Manuel Lopes and Aurelio
Goncalves, who were of mixed race, avoid talking about conflicts between
whites and blacks, those which might have affected them personally
during their studies in Portugal or which they might have witnessed in
Cape Verde. Though these conflicts are probably less frequent in Cape
Verde society than Brazil, they did get worse at particular periods,
especially when a Portuguese expeditionary corps was in Mindelo during
the Second World War (see the story Bola ao centro, in Contos de
Macaronesia, vol. I, by G. T. Didial).

Without a doubt, Brazilian literature that describes the
vicissitudes of the Northeast, with famine and the exodus of peasants to
the towns during the great droughts, was of particular interest to our
writers, since it dealt with problems similar to those we experienced in
our mainly agricultural islands. Passages from the novel Vidas Secas by
Graciliano Ramos or the Pernambuco Christmas Mystery Vida e Morte
Severina by Joao Cabral de Melo e Neto are not very far away from some
pages out of Cape Verde novels about the droughts and famine on Santo
Antao -- Flagelados do Vento Leste by Manuel Lopes, Famintos by Luis
Romano, and A Saga das As-Secas e das Gracas de Nossenhor by Onesimo
Silveira. [See Carreira, 1984, for the social aspects of
twentieth-century famine.] The Northeast of Brazil and the archipelago
are similar in some respects, as is the fate of their two peoples, for
in fact "the inhabitants of Cape Verde live in endemic poverty and
the Nordestino lives in day-to-day poverty" because of cyclical
droughts. Or, as the Brazilian writer Edgar Barbosa sums it up:
"The winds from Cape Verde blow over the Northeast and a whole
series of affinities of ecology, of feeling and of misfortune make us
equals."

Another problem common to both countries is the rise in society of
mulattos or mestizos and the decline of the Casa Grande (the
master's house). This issue has been treated in a more or less
similar way in both literatures -- in Brazil in Fogo Morto by Jose Lins
do Rego [Nunes, 1997] and in Cape Verde in Ilheu da Contenda by Teixeira
de Sousa. To what extent did the existence of the former prompt the
writing of the latter? Given the influence of Brazilian fiction on that
generation of Cape Verde writers, it would perhaps be interesting some
day to carry out a comparative study of what both countries have
produced, with these dimensions of anteriority and intertextuality in
mind.

Let us now return briefly to the question of the influence of
Brazilian poets on their Cape Verde counterparts after Claridade.

It was Tiofe himself [1999: 102] who confessed to having used
Invencao de Orfeu by Jorge de Lima for the conception and structure of
his poem O Primeiro Livro de Notcha (PLN); he also admits that the
`Discourse II' from PLN is inspired a little by Evocacao de Recife
by Bandeira. As for Joao Vario, he acknowledges his interest in Carlos
Drummond de Andrade's poetry: his liking for abstract nouns owes a
lot to the use Drummond makes of them [1999: 101]. Cabral de Melo e
Neto's use of alliteration, which is both inventive and measured,
may have suggested to both Vario and Corsino Fortes solutions for some
of their verses. When Armenio Vieira tells us he received books from
Manuel Bandeira in prison, it helps us to understand the touch of irony
and disenchantment in his early poetry.

Music

There are essentially three musical forms that are very common in
Cape Verde: the morna, the coladeira and the funand. As they are today
they seem to be largely original inventions by the Cape Verde people,
though systematic research still needs to be carried out to clarify
certain aspects, in particular their origin [see Lima, 1979; Almada,
1999].

The presence of Brazilians in Cape Verde, on Boa Vista and
Santiago, during the great period of the salt and urzela trade, or in
the early part of the twentieth century because of the trade plied by
the big companies whose liners served Brazil and other Latin American
countries, as well as the presence of emigrants from Cape Verde who had
returned from Brazil probably helped to popularize Brazilian music and
customs on the islands.

Since its creation maybe nearly two centuries ago on Boa Vista, the
morna has passed through several stages, probably five or six different
ones. According to Vasco Martins [personal communication, 1999] the most
recent stages of the morna's development, the third (1910-1950) and
fourth, were influenced by Latin American, and especially Brazilian,
song.

As regards influences, it is interesting to note that the change
the morna underwent when it came under the influence in Mindelo of B.
Leza, one of the masters of this musical form, is thought to be due to
the composer introducing the Brazilian semi-tone into its structure [see
Martins, 1989].

In fact the 1940s-50s generation of composers and singers,
especially in Mindelo, were strongly influenced by Brazilian music --
samba and baiao. I remember the delight and enthusiasm with which quite
well-known singers such as Lela de Maninha, Marcelo and Djindja tackled
these Brazilian compositions in my district of Mindelo, my little home
town, where this music was very popular. They would play the cavaquinho
Brazilian-style, as well as taking up other Brazilian instruments like
the reco-reco and the cuica. Our composers of Carnaval marches (Goi,
Lulunzim) used to take their inspiration from Carnaval marches from
Brazil. Indeed this is still the case today. The coladeira turned into a
kind of cotadeira-samba.

With musicians from the succeeding generations - Danny Silva,
Manuel de Novas, Tito Paris -- ballads and other forms derived from the
bossa nova were definitely influences. Luis Morais is a special case to
the extent that I think he managed to touch on or incorporate all these
Brazilian musical forms in his style. He may have been assisted in this
by what he inherited from his family, especially his father Musa,
another famous musician from my childhood district.

The chorinho is another musical form that has been taken over by
Cape Verde. Luis Rendall, an excellent exponent of the Spanish guitar
(which is called violao in Cape Verde and Brazil), was the chief person
responsible for introducing it to the islands [Brito, 1998].

Margarida Brito says that, according to the demonstration she was
given by a man of around seventy years old, the funana was danced like
the samba used to be in Brazil. She also points out that the slow
movement of the funana is called samba. There is a question that crops
up in several pieces of research and I do not know whether it has been
answered: Was the word `samba', which was eventually to be applied
to one of Brazil's most popular musical creations, exported from
Cape Verde to Brazil, or was it invented there? Or could it be linked to
the word semba, which is used by Angolans for the umbigada dance?

Dance

There are several dances belonging to the archipelago's past -
lundum, taca, galope, cola-Sanjon, coladeira, among others.

According to the Portuguese conductor Frederico de Freitas, from
the lundum is derived the fado, which was originally a dance, sometimes
accompanied by singing. The lundum was brought from Africa by African
negroes and was danced in Lisbon at the period of the Discoveries [1969:
20]. But Ribas maintains that though "the taca and the lundum,
whose musical accompaniment is more melodious than that for the torno or
the coladeiras, appear to have been imported from Brazil they must have
originated in Africa" [1961, 119]. And he adds: "in any case
these must be among the very many dances that European sailors, who
called at the ports of Brazil and Central America, made popular in
European, and particularly Mediterranean, ports during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries". Dulce Amada writes that "the galope
and the lundum came to us from Brazil but it is not known whether they
came direct or via Portugal. The former was taken up by Capeverdean
composers, who started to use creole in their compositions" [1999:
26]. One of the most famous galopes, manche, was often danced at popular
dances to round off the evening. "The lundum, an umbigada dance
[navel-to-navel, belly-to-belly], which had become established in
Brazil, was also incorporated into the life of Cape Verde, where it was
danced at weddings, at least on Boa Vista", says Almada [1999: 26].
But according to Margarida Brito [1998] it is still danced on the island
and not only at weddings.

On Boa Vista the taca was still being danced in the 1930s, says
Almada, who wonders whether the taca was what the Brazilian fado became
when it was adapted to Cape Verde [1999: 26]. The maxixe, which
originated in Brazil and was probably a variant of the lundum, also used
to be danced on our islands [Brito, 1998].

The coladeira associated with the feastdays of Sao Joao and Sao
Pedro, or cola-San Jon, found on the three North Windward islands (Sao
Vicente, Sao Nicolau, Boa Vista), is an umbigada dance that came from
Angola. According to Dulce Amada, these types of dance acquired the
generic title batuque. Exported to Brazil (direct from Angola or via
Cape Verde?), they ended up as the samba. But the cola-San Jon is danced
differently from the batuque, which is accompanied by singing in
Santiago. Nowadays it is has nothing in common with the Brazilian or the
Angolan batuque [Almada, 1999].

Religion

In West Africa, where the majority of the Africans came from that
were `held' in Cape Verde pending their dispatch to the Americas,
religion was the basis for all human activities, both sacred and secular
[Almada, 1999]. In all likelihood this is important for an understanding
of how the culture of these ethnic groups, who were transplanted into
slave societies, succeeded in withstanding cultural violence and
socio-economic oppression and even in developing further in Brazil and
Cape Verde, to mention only the territories dealt with here.

We have already looked at the areas where this development was
possible or most evident. And indeed it was more or less marked
according to whether these religious practices were more (Brazil) or
less (Cape Verde) strong.

"The surviving remains of African cults in the archipelago are minimal. It
is clear that religious syncretism has lent a certain colouring to
Christian practices in Cape Verde, but I cannot discern an African core to
this colouring [...] On the contrary, ! see the lyricism of shapes and
colours that Gilberto Freyre recognizes in the Catholic practices of
Portugal and Brazil", writes Baltazar Lopes da Silva [1999: 142] and he
adds: "I think it is only in the tabancas of Santiago island that some
feeble echoes of organized cults can be found, but mixed in with normal
Christian practices [...]; maybe the tabanca is losing its ritual character
and, while preserving its formal ritual, will eventually melt into the
batuque in a Dionysiac expression of life" [1999: 142].

Tabanca, a word that was probably imported from Guinea meaning a
village or a group of huts, evolved semantically to the point where it
meant a kind of friendly society formed to assist its members both
emotionally and materially, particularly in cases of death or sickness
or other troubling events [Quintaninha, 1928; Monteiro, 1948; Almada,
1999]. It in fact conjures up memories of societies of slaves and, by
extension, practices that preserve ancient religious values.

There are tabancas named after different saints, which hold cult
events at certain points in the year: between May and July in particular
a cycle reminiscent of the traditional festivals called festas juninas
in Brazil [Semedo & Turano, 1997].

According to Felix Monteiro, research into the tabancas could
provide information on the origin of the slaves who brought these
practices to our islands [Monteiro, 1949]. In the meantime it appears at
first sight a definite fact that the transformation of African practices
remaining on the archipelago, interwoven with their European
equivalents, has not resulted in anything comparable to the macumbas,
candombles or catimbos in Brazil. However, the relationships between
these phenomena need to be better researched, since there could have
been reciprocal influences, among other things [Almada, 1999].

In any case his analysis of the structural elements, both material
and spiritual, of the tabancas led Monteiro [1949] to find some
similarities with the candomble from Bahia. Furthermore, although there
are strong indications that the tabanca is an entirely Capeverdean
creation [see Semedo & Turano, 1997], nevertheless it has been
suggested that it could be a kind of successor to what were called the
reinados, societies of slaves that were formed on Santiago in the
eighteenth century; which could be the equivalent of the congadas or
reisados that appeared in Brazil around the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries [for details see Almada, 1999]. There are other influences
between Brazil and the islands that ought to be researched further in
order to get a more precise idea about certain aspects of the movements
of the bearers of culture, the agents of cultural re-elaboration,
between these two tropical regions.

Beliefs

The Portuguese of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries were deeply
superstitious, as indeed was the whole of Europe at that period. They
believed in witchcraft, called on souls from the other world or
diabolical spirits, made food and drink designed to change
someone's behaviour; in order to read the future they did not
hesitate to use a dead person's or animal's head, water, a
crystal or any shining object such as sword [Almeida, 1990]. Some of
these practices recall techniques that are still used in Angola by the
muilas and cabindas [Varela, 1999b].

They would take stones from rocks and throw them in the water to
make it rain, they worshipped Catholic saints and would travel to
faraway places to attend folk festivals in their honour, or go on
pilgrimages to keep promises made to cure the sick (for instance, Saint
Braz for skin diseases), or for various kinds of protection (for
example, Saint Barbe for protection against lightning) or other good
offices they might provide. However, several of these beliefs (and not
all of them have disappeared even today) were severely punished in
Portugal by royal command: depending on the case, by public whipping,
exile to Ceuta, death sentence, branding on the face with a letter F
followed by deportation to Sao Tome or other islands. Sometimes, as well
as being whipped, the culprit had to pay his accuser a sum of money.

Almeida, who reports these details, summarizes the position in the
following words: "magic, witchcraft, being able to contact
supernatural forces, were as much a part of the imaginary world of the
kingdom's Portuguese as the Amerindian's or the
African's" [1990: 46; see also Espirito Santo, 1980: 86].

In our own day severe punishments are still inflicted in Angola on
witches accused of someone's death by members of the victim's
family; as they are in Europe too -- in Portugal and France, for
instance.

"The Brazilian people are par excellence a people who believe
in the supernatural [...] Which explains why both high and low spiritism
is so popular with them", says Gilberto Freyre [1933: 46]. In this
I think they are like the Capeverdeans.

If I have spent a long time reviewing these matters, it is first in
order to point out what kind of person was sent to colonize our
countries and secondly so that any reader who is not familiar with these
issues should see clearly how understandable it is that a perfect
meeting took place in Brazil and the Cape Verde islands (not to speak of
the other countries of Portuguese-speaking Africa -- Angola, Guinea,
Mozambique, Sao TomE) between the age-old superstitions and magical
practices of the Portuguese and those of the black Africans.

Telling fortunes with an egg-white in a glass of water was a common
occurrence in fifteenth-century Brazil [Freyre, 1933], as also used to
be the case in Cape Verde. I did it myself on Midsummer's Eve when
I was a child, as tradition required. The people around me saw the
egg-white in the glass of water turn into a ship and predicted I would
be a sailor.

We should note some Capeverdean beliefs in magical acts: to trigger
disagreements or even kill or bring sickness, to protect against mortal
danger, to separate husband and wife or bring them back together, to
instigate a marriage, to harm someone using a photo, effigy or doll
resembling them; evil can be done with hairs, pieces of nail saliva, an
object belonging to the enemy or an item of their underclothing
[Monteiro, 1949]. Phenomena similar to some of these spells or beliefs,
probably resulting from the cross-fertilization between African and
European culture, are to be found in Brazil. It remains to be discovered
whether this is because these beliefs were brought to Brazil by the
slaves, who would already have created this syncretism here in Cape
Verde, or whether it is the result of a process of acculturation which
occurred simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic.

There is a strange observation made by Freyre, who writes about
"a piece of medieval magic of the purest European type":
"Antonia Fernandes, nicknamed Nobrega, claimed she was the
Devil's familiar; when people consulted her, it was he who answered
through her. It was `something kept in a bottle that spoke'"
[1974: 309]. This is reminiscent of an object called baloetsi that is
used by the Basotho in Lesotho for medical diagnosis, except that in
their case it is not the devil who is thought to speak but the spirit of
an ancestor who was a doctor [Varela, 1985].

A further quotation from Freyre will conclude this section:

Like Portuguese magic, Brazilian witchcraft, once it was taken over by
blacks, continued to deal with love, reproduction and fertility, to protect
pregnant women's and children's lives, which were threatened by fevers,
cramps, snake-bites, breastbone collapse, the evil eye. Pregnant women were
protected against all these evils and many others by a series of practices
in which African influences, often distorted, were mixed with Catholic
liturgy and remains of indigenous rituals. Various beliefs and sexual
practices imported from Portugal took on new life here: the belief that
mandrake root brings fertility and counteracts evil spells against homes
and additions to the family, the custom among pregnant women of wearing
round their necks `altar stones' in a little bag, of not walking under
ladders during pregnancy, since that would stunt the child's growth [1974:
309-10].

As it has been understood, some of these beliefs have to do with
the traditional healing arts, that is, folk medicine.

Folk medicine

Medicine is one of the richest elements, though not always the
easiest to decipher or interpret, when one is trying to understand the
culture of peoples in a traditional setting or at a pre-scientific stage
[see Varela, 1982, 85; 1999a, bi. First, this is well known, because it
is difficult to identify the most common tasks or the profiles of the
most frequent participants: the soothsayer (who sometimes makes
diagnoses), the healer who is a traditional doctor or practitioner and
is often also a priest and/or sorcerer, the so-called sorcerer himself,
as such, the sick person with his view of the world which is often
arbitrary or `baroque', but not without its own internal logic.
Then it is because the semantic dimension (here the word is involved to
an extent and with a reach that is hard to grasp or verify) creates a
frightening frame full of pitfalls and approximations. This is also the
case with our topic here.

Thanks to indigenous Amerindian women, the Portuguese from the
kingdom learnt about local seeds and drugs, remedies in Brazil that were
unknown in Europe. They had the good sense not to disregard completely
the indigenous healer, even though they gave priority to the
kingdom's official medicine [Almeida, 1990].

It is reported that in the eighteenth century the archbishop of
Para, Brother Caetano Brandao (1782-1789), used to say that it was
better to have someone treated by a healer from the interior, who made
observations with acute instinct, than by doctors from Lisbon. However,
Santos Filho [see 1994: 533] remarks, in his General History of
Brazilian Medicine, that after the discovery of America and during the
period when they were teaching the catechism, the Jesuits started a
defamatory campaign against traditional practitioners and had them
replaced. But in the same text he acknowledges that many Brazilian
remedies made from vegetable material have been incorporated into world
medicine.

At the period when Brazil was being colonized, that is, when
Europeans and slaves started to settle, the local diseases, according to
contemporary reports, were relatively simple ones: pian, endemic goitre,
some parasitic and skin complaints, skin infections that were probably
bacterial or fungal in origin, influenza, rhumatism, respiratory
infections such as pneumonia, pleurisy, complaints due to digestive
troubles, bites from poisonous creatures, war wounds and blindness.

The causes of these diseases were thought to be either natural and
visible (traumas, arrow wounds, for example) or more often supernatural
(for instance, pains, vomiting, fever, diarrhoea). So they used prayer,
blessing, the sign of the cross, various amulets, incantations, a
specific ritual. The causes of most of the illnesses in Cape Verde are
also thought to be supernatural [see Santos & Soares, 1995]; when I
was a child, jaundice was treated mainly by prayer, as was breastbone
collapse [for further details see Vieira, 1989], and this was the case
in Brazil too [see Freyre, 1974].

Apart from plants, both organic and inorganic substances and
various products --blood, saliva, urine, horn, powder made of charred
bone or burnt toad -- were also prescribed as remedies; scarification
was practised, as well as blood-letting, which was common in Europe too
[Santos Filho, 1994].

We should note that during these centuries blood-letting was not
simply used by Europeans for therapeutic purposes: colonists arriving in
the tropics were advised to submit to blood-letting so that their blood
could be replaced with black blood, similar to the natives', which
would help them to acclimatize [Freyre, 1933].

In colonial Brazil as well as Cape Verde or other traditional
societies (for example, Angola, Mozambique, Sao Tome, etc.) traditional
doctors were sometimes also priests or sorcerers. In both roles they
administered remedies often accompanied by unintelligible (especially
for laypeople) words and ritual incantations; they were familiar with
plants with diuretic, antipyretic, anti-dysenterie, purgative, emetic
and haemostatic properties, among others. Their use of some of these
plants (chinchona, coca, ipeca, cashew) can be justified scientifically
because of their active ingredients [see Varela, 1999c].

The medicine of fifteenth-century Europe was at a pre-scientific
stage and indeed remained so, to all intents and purposes, till the mid
nineteenth century [for details and references see Varela, 1982, 1985,
1999a]. To a great degree it was not very different, as regards its
interpretations of sickness and its therapeutic arsenal, from the
medicine practised by the people of the territories where the Portuguese
colonists settled -- Brazil Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau. Slaves
brought to the archipelagos of Cape Verde and Sao Tome, to settle them
or to be traded, were in possession of healing arts that were
comparable.

Finally, we should remember that the training of the European
doctors who accompanied the colonists of that period was generally very
basic [Freyre, 1933; Vieira, 1989; Santos Filho, 1994].

In conclusion, the ideas about the etiology of diseases and the
aspects of the healers' therapeutic methods that we can study in
both the territories that concern us are a result of contributions from
both cultures -- Portuguese and African (as well as Amerindian of
course, in the case of Brazil). So we need to know whether the
similarities between the Cape Verde medical system and the traditional
Brazilian one are `original', that is, whether they occurred
locally, on both sides of the Atlantic (a similar question has been
asked more than once already in this article), or whether in Cape Verde;
for instance, whether these similarities are examples of recreations on
the part of slaves who set out from here, went to Brazil and then
brought these ideas and practices back to the archipelago.

The first possibility seems more plausible, given that medical
systems comparable to those in Cape Verde and colonial Brazil exist in
other regions of Africa (for instance in Lesotho [see Varela, 1985]).
But systematic research needs to be carried out in order to provide a
proper answer.

In a recently published paper [Varela, 1999a; see also Varela,
1995] I set out several similarities between the healing arts in Europe
at the pre-scientific stage and those in Africa in ancient times and
today, particularly with reference to nosology, nosography, etiology and
therapy. In the last two areas, the similarities are to a certain extent
reminiscent of what is said in some passages of the following quotation
(which is long enough to illustrate my point) from Masters & Slaves,
the book by Freyre that I refer to at many points in this article,
sometimes in my own translation of selected pieces, sometimes in
Bastide's translation, as is the case here:

Old wives' remedies that were common in Portugal travelled from there to
Brazil: infusions of bedbugs and rats' turds for stomach upsets, ostrich
marrow to dissolve bile stones, human or mule's urine, burnt hair, crushed
dog's excrement, skin, bones and flesh of toad, lizard, crab, etc. [1974:
353].

At another point in this masterly work he writes:

We find the patriarch of Brazilian medical literature, Dr Joao Ferreira da
Rosa, a seventeenthcentury physician, telling his patients to drink
"powdered burnt crab in a glass of molasses water", to put "under the arms,
in the armpit.., arsenic paste", with "gum arabic", and "for urinary
incontinence" to smear with copaiba oil "the penis, interseminal canal and
belly" [1974: 352-3].

We should add that in traditional Africa, as in colonial Brazil,
remedies and philtres for impotence abound, some more arbitrary and
bizarre than others. But in this respect - and this is an impression
that needs to be checked -- Cape Verde curiously seems to be an
exception. The same could be said for the number of times excrement is
used in various remedies. There too the question as to what influence
Africa had and what Europe had cannot be answered with ease or certainty
at the present stage of research in colonial history and medical
anthropology.

To conclude these reflections on love we should note that for a
long time it was believed in Brazil that men suffering from syphilis and
urethritis could get rid of their disease by making love to young black
virgins, since the germ was passed on to the partner [Freyre, 1933], a
kind of barring in fact [for this concept see Varela, 1999b]. This
recalls the amazing notion in Africa today that makes men with AIDS seek
out young virgins for sex in order to be cured of the infection.

Social life

At different periods Brazil influenced the social life of Cape
Verde, especially the life of Mindelo since its Porto Grande took over
from Santiago as an important way-station for ships making for South
America. Here I am starting from the supposition that specific Brazilian
influences, which should be further researched, are operating nowadays
at four levels: 1) choice of people's names; 2) house types; 3)
women's and girls' styles of dress in the two main towns,
Mindelo and Praia; 4) proliferation of Racionalismo Cristao (Christian
Rationalism) centres and the growing number of their members, who are
directly answerable to their headquarters in Brazil and are somehow
motivated by them. Another level leisure activities, could also be
added.

As regards the Centres of Redemption or Christian Rationalism, we
should note that the craze, which was already there during the colonial
period, has grown considerably since Independence; and their followers
have put up grand buildings, for instance in Mindelo. Furthermore it is
interesting to observe that Capeverdeans are exporting the doctrine,
which is also an alternative therapeutic practice: they have built
Centres in Holland, the USA and other countries that receive emigrants.
According to a recent paper (Graca, 1999) it is thought that an average
of 400 people a year have been cured of various psychopathological
illnesses by two centres operating in Rotterdam.

Around fifty years ago sick people in Mindelo used to send letters
with complaints or symptoms of illnesses for which they needed advice or
treatment to the Centres in Brazil; it seems that this is now less
common, since in the intervening period the directors of the local
Centres have become more autonomous in this respect because they are
better educated.

In the 1940s and 1950s Brazilian influence could be seen among
footballers, singers, composers, guitarists (playing the violao, the
Spanish guitar), viola and cavaquinho players and organizers of Carnaval
processions. This was the influence of Brazilian football popular music
and Carnaval.

The interest two of the most popular of Mindelo's musicians,
Lela de Maninha and Marcelo, showed in Brazilian music, lifestyle and
speech (I think there is also room for research on the words that have
come into the language of Cape Verde from Brazil), the pleasure they got
from singing the baiao and the samba imitating the Brazilian accent, go
to prove it. Their morna and samba sessions would be punctuated by
plentiful snuff-taking or smoking, exchanging quality cigarettes,
drinking glasses of hot toddy, often with or followed by bits of fried
fish or eel (which we call bafa) in portions of varying size, according
those bohemians' financial means, which normally fluctuated; they
used to be my neighbours on Guibarra Street (better known as Morguine
Street) and were often joined by a local singer and composer, Lulunzim,
who was also an enthusiastic brazilophile. That was a way of enjoying
leisure time that could be compared to the Brazilian way, as Freyre has
described it [1972: 30], and it might be thought that it was somehow
influenced by Brazil because of Mindelo's port and the movement of
Capeverdean emigrants. The feeling of similarity is so great that it has
been captured by Barbosa in a poem, Voce, Brasil, by a morna entitled
Brasil, one of whose lines says that Cape Verde is a little piece (um
pedacinho) of Brazil and by a Carnaval march that says the island of Sao
Vicente (which, with its capital Mindelo, has been most influenced by
Brazil as I have already said) is a bresilin (a miniature Brazil),
especially during Carnaval; this march was composed by Pedro Rodrigues
and is sung by the currently most famous Capeverdean singer, Cesaria
Evora [see her recording Cafe Atlantico, Editions lusa-africa, 1999].

During my childhood and teenage years Brazilian influence was felt
mainly in the poorer or most modest sections of society; at that time, I
think, the more favoured classes were especially captivated by English
lifestyle and culture.

Another area of Brazil's influence on the life of Cape Verde
today is that of first names. In fact in Cape Verde till quite recently
they used to be taken from the Christian calendar (as was the case in
Brazil and, for that matter, the Christian world): children were given
the name of the saint on whose day they had been born. The names of
family members were also chosen -- grandparents, parents, uncles;
eventually the name of a historical hero was also selected. Since
Brazilian TV soap operas (telenovelas) became popular, many names that
are clearly of Brazilian origin (for instance, Admilson, Jailson,
Adilson, Hailton, Gerson, Roselice, Josimar, Maira, Zuleide, Gilmara,
Neide, Odair, Jailma, Rosangela, etc.), which have been discovered and
popularized through these soaps, have appeared in our country in great
numbers. The Portuguese have noticed the same phenomenon in Portugal.

Another influence from these TV soaps seems to be the types of
houses that my compatriots have been building for some while, especially
in Mindelo -- huge, sometimes extravagant in structure and shape,
baroque (apparently as seen on TV) -- and it is puzzling how this can be
possible in a country in considerable economic difficulty, where
salaries are generally fairly low and there is not, by any stretch of
the imagination, the wealth there is in Brazil the country that is being
aped. This is accompanied by a certain luxury, which gives rise to the
same kind of remark. This does not contradict what I wrote a while ago
about the emergence of a young high-quality style of Capeverdean
architecture, a completely new phenomenon in a country that has no
specific tradition in this field nor a school of architecture.

In this context it is interesting to note that Nunes [1997], a
professor from the University of Brasilia, who was in Praia for a
Brazilian literature course at the Secondary Teachers Training College,
noticed architectural similarities between our buildings and the
Northeast of Brazil; according to him a number of buildings in Praia are
not very different from the ones you could see in Florianopolis thirty
years ago. Nunes also draws our attention to the fact that a big
open-air market where almost everything sold is called Sucupira, a name
that comes from a Brazilian soap, O Bem Amado by Dias Gomes, which is as
popular with us as it is in Brazil. Something similar has happened in
Angola with an open market called Roque Senteiro. In any case, many
aspects described here of Brazilian influences on the social life of
Cape Verde can also be seen in Angola.

With regard to the luxury mentioned earlier, we should remember
that there are records of considerable luxury and ostentation in
fifteenth-century Portuguese society. Aristocrats who lived in extreme
penury made a great show of luxury in public, which led to the idea that
this was national characteristic -- convenience and comfort are not
important, what is essential is luxury and ostentation [Almeida, 1990:
25]. This recalls what Gilberto Freyre describes on the sugar
plantations in the Northeast of Brazil among the privileged families of
Pernambuco and Bahia [1993]. Mutatis mutandis, could the same be said of
contemporary society in Cape Verde? It would seem so.

Another feature of social life that should be mentioned here
concerns the little attraction marriage had for Capeverdeans; this
situation persisted, if I am not mistaken, right into the mid twentieth
century or thereabouts. I think the change was largely due to the
influence of emigres who had internalized the local customs, in Holland
and France in particular, and came back to find a wife in their native
land.

In all likelihood, the prevalence of cohabitation has the same
explanation as in Brazil where, according to Freyre [1933], it could be
related to the custom of irregular union between white men and black
women, who were often slaves. As is clearly shown in a study quoted by
Mariano [1959], governors and others of the kingdom's important
administrators, as well as small administrators, tradesmen, members of
the clergy, soldiers, etc., cohabited. This all had a decisive part to
play in the racial mixing and the creation of society in both
territories.

The influence of Brazilian culture has been felt in Cape Verde in
many different fields over the centuries; some of these influences have
been discussed here, others still need to be explored, for example,
influences on cuisine and folklore, as well as those we have highlighted
that require further research, on religion, medical systems, language
and leisure activities.

Note

(1.) Unless otherwise indicated, extracts from the texts quoted
were translated from Portuguese into French by the author of this
article.

Joao Manuel Varela: Born in 1937 in Mindelo; first degree from the
University of Lisbon and doctorate in medicine from the University of
Antwerp. After spending more than forty years in Europe, he returned to
his native land in 1998. As well as his work in scientific research
(Professor of Cytology and Cellular Physiology at the Institute of
Marine Engineering and Sea Sciences, ISECMAR, School of Marine Biology)
and his interest in medical anthropology and primary health care, he is
a novelist, storyteller, poet and essayist. His published work includes
fourteen books and several essays in various reviews and journals, under
three pseudonyms: G.T. Didial (O estado Impenitente do Fragilidade, a
novel 1989; Contos de Macaronesia, Vols. I, 1992, and II, 1999; Joao
Vario, nine books of poetry published between 1966 and 1998: Exemplos,
collected in a single volume, EXAMPLES, this year, Books 1-9, 2000; T.T.
Tiofe: O Primeiro Livro de Notcha, 1975.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Sage Publications, Inc.
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.